Introduction

The Ubuntu developers are moving quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source community has to offer. The Quantal Quetzal Alpha 1 Release of Ubuntu 12.10 is a developer snapshot to give you a very early glance at the next version of Ubuntu.

Get Ubuntu 12.10

Upgrading from Ubuntu 12.04

To upgrade from Ubuntu 12.04 on a desktop system, press Alt+F2 and type in "update-manager -d" (without the quotes) into the command box. Update Manager should open up and tell you: New distribution release '12.10' is available. Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions. Please read the known issues, before trying this.

To upgrade from Ubuntu 12.04 on a server system: install the update-manager-core package if it is not already installed; launch the upgrade tool with the command sudo do-release-upgrade -d; and follow the on-screen instructions. Note that the server upgrade will utilize GNU screen and automatically re-attach in case of e.g. dropped connection problems.

Download the Alpha 1

This release is for developers only. The Ubuntu Desktop images are now bigger than a standard CD, and you should use a USB for installation.

New features in Quantal

Updated Packages

As with every new release, packages--applications and software of all kinds--are being updated at a rapid pace. Many of these packages came from an automatic sync from Debian's unstable branch; others have been explicitly pulled in for 12.10 Quantal Quetzal.

Linux kernel 3.4

Quantal Alpha-1 includes the 3.4.0-5.11 Ubuntu kernel which was based on the final v3.4 upstream Linux kernel. This is an update from the 3.2.0-23.36 Ubuntu kernel which shipped in Precise Pangolin 12.04 and was based on the v3.2 upstream Linux kernel. Other notable changes with the Quantal Alpha-1 kernel include the transitioning of the i386 generic-pae flavor to become the generic flavor offering, collapsing of the virtual flavor back into the generic flavor, and homogenizing the entire linux-meta package. We also see the arrival of a new highbank arm server kernel flavor.

GCC 4.7

In Quantal Alpha-1, the 4.7 version of GCC is replacing the 4.6 version that was included in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Python 3.0

For 12.10, we intend to ship only Python 3 with the Ubuntu desktop image, not Python 2. Alpha-1 begins this process, with the installer and some other applications ported to Python 3. There are still quite a few packages left to port, and so Python 2 and 3 are both installed for the time being.

If you have your own programs based on Python 2, fear not! Python 2 will continue to be available (as the python package) for the foreseeable future. However, to best support future versions of Ubuntu you should consider porting your code to Python 3. Python/3 has some advice and resources on this.

General

Until Ubuntu 11.10, the Unix group for administrators with root privileges through sudo had been admin. Starting with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, it is now sudo, for compatibility with Debian and sudo itself. However, for backwards compatibility, admin group members are still recognized as administrators.

Automatic Apport crash reporting has been enabled by default again to catch problems early on. It now checks for duplicates on the client side, which will avoid uploading debug data and creating Launchpad bug reports unnecessarily in many cases now.

Ubuntu

In 12.10, the CD and DVD Ubuntu Desktop images are being consolidated into a single 800MB image usable on a USB disk or a DVD.

The remainder of GNOME 3.4 is now in the Ubuntu archives including Disks, Evolution, Seahorse/GNOME Keyring, and Totem. Some parts of GNOME 3.5.1/3.5.2 have already arrived with more to follow as we target GNOME 3.6 for Ubuntu 12.10.

udisks2 was uploaded to quantal and is used as the default backend for Unity and GNOME.

firefox and thunderbird have been updated to the new 13 version

Update Manager got a slightly new look, more to come in the future.

The "launchpad integration" menu items (report a bug, ask for help, translate) have been deprecated

The installer no longer offers the "migration assistant" that migrated documents and settings from other operating systems. This was a continuing source of bug reports, and the installer team felt that it was not worth the resources to bring it up to a level of quality sufficient to continue including it.

Ubuntu Server

Starting with this milestone, we are trialling the removal of i386 Ubuntu Server CD image. This means that the primary supported installation method is AMD64, the 64-bit release (X86_64).

However, other supported installations mechanisms for i386, such as mini.iso and netboot are still supported, which are an initial minimal download; and install directly from the network.

i386 images for Alpha is also available, but is not declared as part of the Alpha 1 release.

Feedback is most appreciated, if this causes issues for particular hardware.

Unlike the Desktop flavour, we are currently targeting the 12.10 Server image to fit onto a standard cd image (703MB). However, some structural changes are expected for Alpha 2, which will allow us to re-review this sizing requirement.

Ubuntu Server Cloud images

The Ubuntu Server Cloud images have not undergone significant change prior to alpha 1 that is not represented by package upgrades or other notes. The most notable change is that images now should boot without a 5 second delay at the grub prompt.

Kubuntu

Kubuntu 12.10 Alpha 1 includes lots of merges and syncs from Debian. Key packages that have been updated include:

KDE 4.8.3

Amarok 2.6 beta

Edubuntu

The Edubuntu package selection has been slightly updated to include gnote (note taking), klettres, kalgebra, kgeography, cantor and rocs. Stellarium has also been replaced by kstars.

Language packs have now been moved to the DVD pool instead of the live environment, making the installation process up to 30 minutes shorter. This also means that in this alpha, the live environment won't be translated, this will be fixed for alpha-2.

Lubuntu

The changes to default applications is still being discussed.

Xpad has been updated to 1.4 (Closes Bug 917356). Adding shortcuts to PCManFM is done.

Known issues

As is to be expected, at this very early stage of the release process, there are some significant known bugs that developers may run into with the Quantal Alpha 1 Release. The ones we know about at this point (and some of the workarounds), are documented here so you don't need to spend time reporting these bugs again:

Migration

Upgrade from Precise Desktop with update-manager fails with "can't load DistUpgradeViewGtk (No module named vte)" (1009226) The command line version of the upgrader works correctly (do-release-upgrade -d)

Lubuntu

For a listing of more known issues, please refer to the Quantal Quetzal bug tracker in Launchpad.

Reporting bugs

It should come as no surprise that this Alpha 1 release of Quantal Quetzal contains other bugs. Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions will help fix bugs and improve the quality of future releases. Please report bugs using the tools provided.

If you want to help out with bugs, the Bug Squad is always looking for help.

Participate in Ubuntu

These images were able to be made available to you thanks to the help of our QA Community

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at